Cartographic Perspectives

Review of The Art of Insight: How Great Visualization Designers Think

Lily Houtman — 2024-06-10

Review of Buffalo in 50 Maps

Kimberly L. Campbell — 2024-07-05

Review of The National Atlas of Korea for Children

Aimée C. Quinn — 2024-08-13

The Map on your Map: Ten Things to Consider When Making A Locator Map

Vicky Johnson-Dahl — 2024-12-09

About the Cover

Caroline Rose — 2024-12-09

Masthead

About CP — 2024-12-09

Letter from the Editor

Jim Thatcher — 2024-12-09

How Did Early Modern Scholars Study Early Maps?

Matthew H Edney — 2024-09-23

Skelton (1972), followed by Harley (1987), invented “the history of cartography” as a field of study with deep historical roots, giving the field an origin deep in the Renaissance, perhaps even in the Middle Ages. In doing so, Skelton imposed modern scholarly practices onto early modern scholarship, without regard for contemporary knowledge practices. This essay counters the invented tradition by exploring how early modern scholars engaged with maps from the contemporary past (“early maps”). It identifies three distinct sets of scholars whose variant agendas led them to work with early maps in markedly different ways. First, Classical historians used the Peutinger map and Ptolemy’s Geography to identify locations of ancient places to improve their comprehension of Classical texts. Second, some geographers wrote histories of voyages and travels that related past routes to contemporary maps, and others wrote historical narratives of the compilation of encyclopedic texts and maps of world and regional knowledge. (This analysis requires a reconceptualization of early modern “geography.”) Third, antiquaries opportunistically described and at times reproduced a variety of maps, charts, and plans that came to their attention, but without actively searching for early maps. Overall, this essay demonstrates that before 1775 there was neither a systematic approach taken to the study of early maps nor any hint of the core methodology that would be adopted by the first historiographical mode of map history as it developed after 1830.

Is it a Map? The Map / Not Map Question

Mark Denil — 2024-12-09

This paper is an evaluation of the issues raised in my own “Making Explicit What has Been Implicit: A Call for a Conceptual Theory of Cartography,” and Matthew Edney’s “Making Explicit the Implicit, Idealized Understanding of ‘Map’ and ‘Cartography’: An Anti-Universalist Response to Mark Denil” (both published in Cartographic Perspectives 98, 2022).

In the first of these articles I make some proposals about how to go about investigating how a map reader decides that a given artifact is a map, and what that decision means for the user’s relationship with the artifact. In the second, Edney vigorously rejects my argument as, variously: irrelevant, reactionary, subversive, pernicious, obvious, and trite.

What are Edney and I arguing about? Does the map / not map question I raise even exist and, if so, does it matter? Is Edney correct in dismissing it, and are his reasons for dismissing it valid?

This paper examines some of the salient points raised in the Denil / Edney controversy, with an eye to the pragmatic, real-world ramifications of each writer’s positions.

Instructions to Authors

Author Instructions — 2024-12-09